I won the LK Article Challenge!

As I’ve mentioned previously here, this November I entered the Lieurance-King Autumn Challenge (Fall). The wonderful news is that I am among the winners, and will soon be awarded the Golden PJs.

The challenge brief was to write 15 marketing articles during the month of November and submit them to article directories like Ezine Articles.

Marketing articles are different from journalistic articles, in that the writer aims to empower readers. It gives readers explanations of why they should do something, how they should do it, what to watch out out for etc.

So list articles, like 5 Books You Should Not Buy Your Children This Christmas would go down better than an article where I talk about my writing processes in essay format.

As always, the heading should be interesting enough to prompt people to check out the story and tell the reader right off bat what to expect in the article. The article should also use key words so it is easy to find through search engines.

The content should also be informative enough for readers to want to know more about the writer so they click through from the web site where it is published to your blog/web site.

So the Challenge fit in with my agenda to grow my online profile both as a journalist on ITWeb and on my blogs.

I’m sure you’re wondering if learning to write these marketing articles, submitting them and entering a challenge like the LK Article Challenge is worth the time and effort?

If you’re a long-term reader of this blog, you’d know I am actually not convinced, and embarked on the exercise to find out if the online experts are right for punting article marketing as an effective promotion technique.

I figured if it doesn’t actually bring hits to ITWeb and my blogs, I’d still have a huge number of articles published online, and learning to write in another style would expand my repertoire. I can now officially state that I am more optimistic about article marketing. I haven't seen fantabulous results yet, but traffic on this particular blog is growing and steady.

Also, my Google and Technorati rankings, in my niche [African children’s stories] are improving, which makes it easier to find me in this huge World Wide Web universe.

My Mobile Life blog is growing more rapidly and daily traffic far exceeds what I see here already, even though I’ve only been blogging there for a couple of months.

Part of the reason is that the topic has wider appeal (cellphones), partly it's because the blog is part of a network, so other bloggers on that network read the work. Another reason is that I did already have some credibility on that subject, so readers were predisposed to check out what I had to say there.

You know, when I first started this post, I was just going to do a short announcement of my win. But it has turned out to be more of a sharing of my promotion experience as a blogger. I hope you find the information useful in some way.